: If greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow over the next several decades, scientists are predicting that Antarctica's ice sheet will collapse, raising global sea levels by more than 3 feet by 2100.
"That is literally remapping how the planet looks from space," study co-author Rob DeConto, a geoscientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, told Nature.
Here are some facts about the planet's single biggest ice mass, and why it is so important to the planet.

It's absolutely huge: The Antarctic Ice Sheet covers 5.4 million square miles, making it roughly the same area as the lower 48 states of the U.S. and Mexico combined.
It contains 7.2 billion cubic miles. Antarctic ice amounts to 90 percent of all the ice on the planet and between 60 and 70 percent of all of the world's fresh water.

Antarctica is home to about 70 percent of the planet's fresh water, and 90 percent of the planet's freshwater ice.
If the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet melted, it could put the world's coastal cities underwater. Global sea levels would rise by about 200 feet.

When the Antarctic sea ice begins to expand at the beginning of winter, it advances by around 40,000 square miles per day, and eventually doubles the size of Antarctica, adding up to an extra 4.9 million square miles of ice around the land mass.

Ice shelves, which are portions of the ice sheet, can break up with surprising speed.
In 2002, the entire Larsen B Ice Shelf, which covered 1,250 square miles (3,250 square kilometers) disintegrated in a single month.